Portishead, formed by producer Geoff Barrow, vocalist Beth Gibbons, sound engineer Dave McDonald and guitarist Adrian Utley, were the ultimate creation of Bristol's fertile scene. The spectral and funereal lieder of Dummy (1994) set desolate laments to a casual backdrop of electronic music and let them float over a disorienting flow of syncopated beats. They had blurred the line between the pop ballad and the abstract chamber piece.
If English is your first language and you could translate this text, please contact me.
Scroll down for recent reviews in english.
(Italian text translated by/Tradotto da Greta Caserini)

Bristol's Portishead Bristol are the leaders, and possibly the founders,
of the "trip-hop" movement. However, their style is just the vehicle, in
fact the content is a depressed yearning for peace of damned
souls wandering in the urban neurosis days. Their songs aren't just
songs, but the sound tracks of mini "sleepwalkers movies" in which the
dreaming leading actor is always defeated .

Portishead is the Bristol area where Geoff Barrow grew up. Being a
fan of Massive Attack he started composing and recording hip hop at home,
until Neneh Cherry bought his "Sunday". Barrow became =
a
production assistant and met the future singer Beth Gibbons in one
of the studios he was working in, a frail and shy woman who found out to
know how to give voice to the tradition of soul. Dave McDonald
(sound engineer) and Adrian Utley (guitarist) joined them. The rest was a
natural consequence coming from the mixture of these
four personalities and of their music backgrounds.

The album Dummy (Go Disc, 1994) launched them with a handful of spectral
and mournful songs that udate to modern technology the intuitions of
musicians such as Cowboy Junkies and Angelo Badalamenti, Sade and Al Green,
Young Marble Giants and Barry Adamson.

But arrangements fail on "Portishead" (Go Beat, 1997), which is a
much more regular album, or at least not as transgressive as "Dummy".
Gibbons does not find the right balance, not with the
hysterical lullaby of Cowboys nor with the lamentation
in falsetto of Undenied, nor with the strident notes of
SevenMonths.Leaving behind the oneiric dream, the album expresses a
vigorous desperation like Billie Holliday's works, but without her
vocal gift.
At the end what remains is just a patina of delicate jazz-blues sounds
which can be found in All Mine and Mourning Air, in
the soul - jazz of Western Eyes andin the slow blues
of Over, songs that the lovers of this gender have been
listening to a 100 times.
The marks of suffering which run through their first songs can here be
found only in Humming - "Greek tragedy" trilling and
requiem keyboards - and maybe in the Only You poem
made of disconsolate actings, samplings and impetuous
scratches .Half Day Closing too, which is maybe the most spectral song
because of the different guitar effects, percussion patterns, bass guitar
phrases, song distortions and which draws inspiration from the United
States of America goes on at a schizophrenic step. I would say that
these are rather neurotic then psychedelic sounds.
Between "Portishead" and "Dummy" there is a shady but substant=
ial
difference: there is a bigger use of real instruments (even if sampling
and electronics are still dominant), a greater respect for the hip hop
canons - in particular the kind of Wu-Tang Chang and Fugees
- and a maniac and recluse passion in reducing the sound
of record players, a rather technical then an
artistic passion.
This album shows us that Barrow and Gibbons had an intelligent idea, but
not more then an idea.

As Massive Attack did before them, Portishead took the hip-hop
language and move it away from the ghettos where it
was born, adapting it - with jazz fragments, muzac and film
noir cliches to the moral decadency of white neighborhoods.

Portishead's guitarist Adrian Utley has released
Warminster (Ochre, 1999), an EP that harks back to the heydays of
electronic music (e.g., Morton Subotnick).

Beth Gibbons has released Out Of Season (Go Beat, 2002), a
collaboration with "Rustin Man" (Paul Webb of O'Rang),
a collection of nostalgic tributes to easy-listening
(Tom The Model, Drake, Romance)
and late-night jazz (Show).
Indulging in orchestrations of brass, strings, reeds, keyboards, guitars,
the duo rarely masters the art of the
ethereal and the melancholy (Mysteries, Funny Time of Year)
that Portishead was so good at.
Geoff Barrow was the real soul of Portishead's early albums.

Portishead's
III (Mercury, 2008), their first album in eleven years, recorded
between 2005 and 2007, hardly repeated their stylistic mantra. Only
Silence
(violin whistles, loping breakbeat, casual guitar twang,
tempo shift, agonizing croon)
and Hunter
(feeble litany, alien noises, sleepy waltzing rhythm)
replicate the mood of their original trip-hop
(and even these do not bother with their trademark beats).
They rank also among the weakest songs of the album.
Elsewhere Gibbons' voice, admittedly
the most recognizable element of their sound, has to compete with an arsenal
of electronic and digital effects that belong to the canons of both
industrial music and progressive-rock in
Nylon Smile (frenzied thin polyrhythm, exotic guitar notes, jazzy vocals),
and especially Machine Gun, an electronic bombardment of beats on
a tapestry of renaissance-style chanting.
The gem of the album is the tribal atonal feast We Carry On, worthy
of Suicide.
The sparse but harsh musical setting crafts expressionist kammerspiels such
as Plastic (with the refrain replaced by the act of screaming against
walls of noise) and the
seven-minute Small, whispered like a fairy tale in between detours
of gothic martial organ.
By comparison, the crystalline and acoustic The Rip is a Donovan-ian lullaby (even though after two minutes it transforms into a synth-pop ballet).
Magic Doors is the only regular song, and sounds out of context.
The arrangements are the exact opposite of "lush".
A sense of emptiness "fills" the suspended atmosphere of the album.

Portishead's Geoff Barrow launched the post-rock project
Beak> with Beak> (2009),
recorded live with no overdubs but later edited to insert
arrangements. A more elegant atmospheric post-rock aesthetic permeated
Beak II (Invada, 2012).
Barrow also teamed up with
Ben Salisbury to
score the imaginary movie soundtrack
Drokk - Music Inspired By Mega-City One (Invada, 2012) in the vein
of the then fashionable John Carpenter soundtracks.

Portishead seemed to start a new career with the
disco-oriented Chase The Tear (2011).